What factors affect the refresh performance of Reveal?

When you do a refresh of your application in Reveal it snapshots
each and every view in your application, with and without each
view's subviews. It effectively captures the bitmap for each view
twice. That's how Reveal manages to render accurate 2D and 3D
representations of your application's view hierarchy, but it comes
at the cost of a lot of image transfers.

The time it takes to refresh your application is a factor of how
many views are in the view hierarchy, how large the views are and
how fast the network connection is between the iOS application and
Reveal running on your Mac.

In the simulator this is usually quick because the connection
between the simulator and Reveal is obviously very quick. When
testing on device, factors such as the network speed, the
complexity of the view hierarchy and the device you're testing on
(retina or non-retina) can have a huge effect on refresh speed.

Note however that when you edit properties of a view in one of
the inspectors Reveal tries to optimise the update by only doing a
partial refresh. In this case it re-snapshots all subviews of the
affected view and all parent views to try and capture any side
effects. That can be a lot quicker than doing a full refresh, but
it can still take some time to re-capture and transfer all those
images depending on your environment.

Going forward, in addition to adding new feature to Reveal we
will also be working to optimise performance across different
scenarios.